The Smartest Cheats in Casino History

Casinos are the only place in the world where you can multiply your money instantly, where you can convert € 10 to € 1000 within one hour. Although you can earn money buying stocks or investing money in a high interest account, nothing can beat the excitement of beating the house in a casino game and end up with benefits much greater than the original amount.

Throughout the history of casinos, there have been a number of players who have been able to cheat the system. Some have ended up returning the money by losing, others have been captured and arrested, but there are others who have been smart enough to win at a casino and end up leaving richer than when they started.

The Kings Of The Blackjack

You may think that it is impossible to win a huge amount of money playing blackjack. After all, when you play online blackjack, the most you can get with just one hand is a 3: 2 payout, although you can potentially double your money by doubling or dividing your bet.

However, a man named Don Johnson managed to cheat three casinos in Atlantic City in 2011. Johnson was not a normal player and had a great experience in the business aspects of horse racing.

Johnson visited these casinos and managed to negotiate very good deals for the blackjack table, including a return of losses of up to 20%. This type of money-back arrangement supposed that it was Johnson who enjoyed the margin of the house instead of the casino, and it was not long before his profits began to accumulate.

Surprisingly, Johnson knew how to accumulate more than 15 million dollars before the casinos stopped allowing these good conditions. Although it was not exactly cheating on the tables, it made the casinos compete with each other before they realized that the advantage with which they played was causing them to lose significant amounts.

Johnson was not the only one who thrived at the blackjack table. This is where the MIT blackjack team comes in. This group of top-notch players, who devised a system to win the house over and over again, was so successful during the 1990s, that a movie was made about them, the 21st movie.

Counting cards in blackjack is something that a large number of people have tried. After all, if you play blackjack in the normal way, even if you know when to ask, stand, fold and divide, that is not always enough to get benefits, and not in the long term.

However, if you count the cards in a traditional casino, you can know the odds of a low or high card coming out at a certain time. For example, if a series of low cards has been played, then it is logical that a high card finally comes out of the deck.

In 1980, six students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) created a sophisticated way of counting cards and originated a movement of players who would benefit from playing blackjack in this way. After traveling to Atlantic City and winning a small fortune, they shared their knowledge with others.

It was a very specialized operation that led to a large number of recruits being trained and put to the test before representing the MIT team in the casino rooms. It is believed that there were 35 active players in 1984 and that these players were responsible for amassing $ 500,000.

The Roulette Millionaire

Gonzalo Garcia Pelayo is a household name when we talk about smart cheaters in casinos. It is believed that the Spanish won $ 1.5 million playing roulette and deciphering the code each time he visited the tables.

Like the MIT team, he realized that there was a way to develop a margin of advantage, although he focused more on roulette failures than on the card count of the blackjack table.

Garcia Pelayo was convinced that no roulette wheel was perfectly equal, and that there were numbers that were more likely to come out an extraordinary number of times than other numbers.

Pelayo spent hours in the casinos of Madrid, watching the roulette wheel spin again and again to determine what kind of advantage he could get. Then, it entered the data collected in a machine and generated probabilities.

According to the legend, when the Spaniard began playing in a casino in Madrid, he managed to win up to € 600,000 in that game session. Naturally, it was a system that would lead him to be banned from entering several establishments.

In the early nineties, Garcia Pelayo went to Las Vegas and achieved even greater success deciphering the imperfections of roulette, even playing American roulette, which has a double zero and further increases the advantage of the house.

He managed to accumulate almost 2 million dollars in several casinos in Las Vegas before obtaining a general ban across the state, although Gonzalo did not like this verdict and appealed to the Supreme Court alleging that he had done nothing wrong.